IntheMood by Lynne Connolly Read Free Book Online Page B

a proud display that read “Kismet
Studios”.
    “Fate?” she queried, turning to him with a smile.
    He shrugged. “It sounded good. Don’t you think?”
    “Sure.” It could, after all, be as simple as that.
    “Teresa, this is V. Put her name down on the list. V Hamid.”
    “List?” she asked.
    “People allowed straight through. You’ll have to sign the
guest list, but you can come and go as you wish after that.”
    This was a privileged world. As a musician amongst
musicians, she took the world for granted, but people hounded by the press and
others would come to this place. A studio should provide them with a degree of
peace, since it was their place of work. She was stepping into a different
position here, maybe into a new part of her life.
    What happened last night had nothing to do with it, at least
that was what she told herself. Until she felt his presence at her back and
knew she was lying to herself.
    “Thank you.”
    “Think nothing of it.”
    Just like acquaintances who’d never touched each other’s
bodies in the deep of night, they walked side by side through to a studio at
the back.
    It wasn’t V’s first time in a recording studio, so the
relative smallness of the control booth and the studio beyond didn’t bother
her. Her uncle Claud had sometimes recorded in a tiny place that had closed
down five years ago.
    Someone was already there, an African American of maybe
forty, tall, his head shaved bald. Hot. He cocked a brow at Matt.
    “V, meet AZ.” Matt sighed theatrically. “This business is
full of initials.”
    “Pleased to meet you, V,” said AZ in a voice of pure velvet.
“You’re a Hamid, aren’t you?”
    He was probably a native of Chicago, or had lived here for a
long time. Outside the city, Hamid meant the thing her father had invented.
Inside, it meant the family, and their tentacles of interest and influence.
    She nodded. Matt put her sax case down in front of her.
“Guess it’s a good job I met you first, hey?” He took a seat in a well-worn
leather chair and motioned to the one next to him, not so well worn. “How do
you want to do this?”
    She sat down. She knew exactly what she wanted to do. “If I
go in there, can you play the track to me on a loop? I’ll tell you when I’ve
got it.”
    “I heard V last night,” Matt said to his engineer, “and if
the band agrees, she’s just what the new track needs.” He gave her an
apologetic smile. “I’m sorry, V, but I have to ask you to sign a nondisclosure
agreement before you hear the track. It’s not me, it’s the band.”
    She understood perfectly and if he expected trouble, he
wouldn’t get it from her. Bootlegging could wreck the impact the band needed
from the first release of the album. The agreement was simple and it had no
tricky clauses. She had no problem signing that.
    She walked toward the door connecting the control booth with
the studio. “This new track got a name?” V asked from the door.
    “ She’s So Sexy .”
    V groaned, but it was their track. Matt’s laughter followed
her into the studio. She found a stool and tested the keys, pulled out the
bottle of water she’d grabbed from the refrigerator in her apartment, wet her
throat and her lips.
    He played the track. She loved it, and it took her two
listens to settle down and absorb the melody and chord changes. On the fifth
listen, she thought she had it. When he looped it again, she added some riffs
and trills. Then just before the band broke into a new key, she played a fast
scale, linking the keys and adding a melancholy note. This track was sultry,
slow, the kind of power ballad that could go right into people’s hearts, but
Matt was right—it needed something else. Something new, and she could do it, she
had no doubt about that.
    He looped it again without comment, and she did it again,
leaving out some notes this time, giving the notes that remained a chance to
breathe. She left that scale, and added another one later, exactly the